8 day lag... wow, we need to really buckle down on some of these. pillow talk 16:48, 17 July 2008 (UTC)

Humour:

4

As I see it, the problem with this article is that it starts with a funny concept, and then doesn't progress anywhere from there. Every single joke in this article is contained in its title; reading the one-line blurb on the front page is exactly as funny as reading the article - and it's better, because it doesn't take as long. The themes of the individual paragraphs are:

1. Giambi's mustache won the entire world series by itself, and the rest of the season was canceled. Well, okay. We knew that, because it's the title of the article.

2. There will be no All-Star game, and Giambi's mustache will win the Home Run derby. That's little more than a logical extension of the joke in the title.

3. Giambi's mustache will win many awards, including ones it isn't eligible for. Again, a logical extension of the joke in the title. The thing about winning Cleveland Indians Man of the Year is arguably a "new" joke, but it doesn't make me laugh.

4. A quote from Girardi, which is pretty much what you'd expect in this situation.

One joke can't carry an entire article - not even a short UnNews piece. There needs to be more. I'm sure you considered writing about the absurdity of a mustache playing baseball - how does it hold the bat? How does it circle the bases? It seems you came down on the side of not going into those kinds of details. That might have been the right call, but I'm hard-pressed to think of other (logical) ways to get more jokes in here.

Because obviously the article is going to leave the reader wondering about the relationship between Giambi and his mustache. Who swings the bat? Who catches the pop flies? Is Giambi just being dragged around the field by his mustache? Or is he playing normally, and we understand the mustache to be the source of his super powers? The former seems funnier to me, but, of course, it might be too absurd for the deadpan tone.

Concept:

7

It's a funny concept, no doubt, but, as I said above, it's a little unclear, since there are no details on how the mustache won the World Series. And, of course, every concept has to go somewhere. An article needs a beginning, a middle, and an end, and this one just hits us with everything at the beginning and then contains some more words because that's a requirement of an article.

Prose and formatting:

6

The formatting is fine. The prose isn't terrible - it does, for the most part, sound like journalistic prose - but there are some weird uses of commas in there. For example, a newspaper would probably start the article "Forget the all-star game. Forget playoffs. This year, the Yankees' best player, Jason Giambi's mustache, has won the entire world series by itself." That's about four punctuation changes, but I think it reads better that way. Similarly, the third paragraph starts with a sentence which, although technically grammatically correct, contains more subordinate clauses than one would ever expect to find in a newspaper. It should be broken up.

Images:

4

Well, it's just a picture of Giambi, who has a mustache. It gives us the impression that Giambi is playing the baseball and that he happens to be a guy with a mustache, which of course is the joke your source is making. It could have been rather hilarious to Photoshop a bat hovering next to his face with his mustache wrapped around the handle. Or just stick a catcher's mitt on the end of his mustache. The caption is amusing for its casual cruelty, but it has usage errors in it and should be rewritten.

Miscellaneous:

4.2

Averaged via guessing what the average is.

Final Score:

25.2

This is a serviceable UnNews, I guess, but it's not exactly FA material. What it needs, if you're interested in improving it, is more. The fact that UnNews is generally short doesn't mean that it can get by on fewer jokes - if anything, it means that the jokes have to be more densely packed into the article. As I've said a few times, the logical next step would be to include some stuff about just how exactly a mustache would play baseball. Yeah, that takes the article in a very different direction, and maybe not the direction you had in mind, but at least it's a direction.